All Script And Tols For Free: 🔍 Google Shopping goes free (and paid)

🔍 Google Shopping goes free (and paid)

Apr 22, 2020

Good morning Search Marketer remember Froogle?

Yesterday's big news is that Google is opening up Google Shopping to free, organic product listings. This is an evolution we've been watching closely and in many ways is a back to the future moment for Google product search, which used to be free, before it shifted to a purely paid product in 2012. A little over a year ago, Google opened Merchant Center to all retailers to start enabling organic product visibility in areas of the search results, including Image search. More recently, Google began showing organic product listings in a section called "Popular products" — and now Shopping.

Google President of Commerce, Bill Ready, who joined the company from PayPal in December, said the coronavirus crisis accelerated Google's plans to enable free product listings. To get started, you'll need to set up a Google Merchant Center account, upload a product feed and opt into "surfaces across Google."

Of course, we have to look at this move in the context of Amazon and the battle for product search share (which Amazon is winning). The argument for making Google Shopping predominantly free as I see it is: A bigger universe of products –> better search experiences –> more product searches –> more competitive against Amazon –> more valuable for advertisers. Of course, clawing back share won't be as easy as flipping the switch. But certainly, for us, product search SEO takes on greater importance now.

In other news, Facebook listened to advertisers and is backtracking on its CBO requirement. There will be no more mandatory migration to campaign budget optimization (CBO). You'll have the choice to have budgets managed at the campaign or ad set level.

We know many businesses are continuing to struggle during this time and there are many economic indicators that can make it hard to see a light at the end of this tunnel. Greg Sterling sees some signs of hope for marketers trying to figure out campaign strategies. Among them, consumer sentiment and surging sales after many consumers received their stimulus checks last week.

Keep reading for a Pro Tip from Greg Gifford on images in Google My Business and more.

Ginny Marvin,
Editor-In-Chief

P.S. Today at 12:00 p.m. EST, I'll be joining Frederick Vallaeys, Joe Martinez and Andrew McGarry for PPC Townhall. You can register to join in here!

Pro Tip

Using high-quality photos in GMB will help break through the noise

"Businesses should always upload photos because it's a much better signal both to Google and to customers if you're loading in images AS the business," explains SMX speaker Greg Gifford of SearchLab. "Remember, GMB is basically a direct interface with Google's entity database – so when you upload as the business owner, you're directly telling Google that these are photos related to your business. It also looks better to human users – they can see what you're trying to show about your business. If you're fighting against user-uploaded photos showing instead of yours, you need to be sure you're uploading professionally shot, high-res photos – they're more likely to be 'chosen' by the algorithm."

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Search Shorts

Meta robots, hreflang and COVID-19 for Google Local Service ads.

Meta robots in Javascript. If the HTML has a noindex, Google won't process the meta robots in your JavaScript, said Google's Martin Splitt.

Hreflang vs user interface. It is simple, hreflang annotations do not replace a usable UI, noted John Mueller of Google.

Google Local Services Ads COVID-19. Google is allowing some businesses to add COVID-19 related details to their local service ads, Tom Waddington noticed.

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